Category: London Review of Books
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from Bernard Porter’s LRB article on Julia Lovell’s The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China: When it came to explaining their humiliations, the Chinese tended not to blame the invaders so much as themselves, or their Manchu…
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…and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee . – Donne In the review article “Hubbub”, Nicholas Spice answers: [T]he most poignant encounters with music are inadvertent and unplanned. Church bells heard across the fields…
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We can only see the Sistine Chapel for the first time once, and we can never be surprised twice by the outcome of a poem or a novel, the unexpected modulations of a piece of Haydn or the wild ramifications…
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–In this LRB article, Frank Kermode answers: It was in 1948 that he [Empson] first outlined the theory in a letter to his wife: Bloom would like to make love to Molly but hasn’t done so for ten years, since…
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. In his recent LRB article on Wikileaks, “Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks” (recommended), Slavoj Žižek (2011) answers: . In Baisers volés, Delphine Seyrig explains to her young lover the difference between politeness and tact: ‘Imagine you inadvertently enter…
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“You Have Never Written Better” by Benjamin Markovits |As Byron himself remarked, you couldn’t expect any verse to be all good.| “Some Sort of a Solution” by Charles Simic |he needed his small circle of friends, for they were his…
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“You’ll Love the Way It Makes You Feel” by Mark Greif |‘Think of me as a boy,’ the woman begs.| “Hysterical Vigour” by Frank Kermode |The title of this novel comes from the Chinese national anthem: Arise, ye who refuse…
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“At the Movies” by Michael Wood — A discussion of No Country for Old Man (directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen) |It says he doesn’t understand what’s happening, of course; but it also says he doesn’t believe he doesn’t…
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“On Radio 4” by Peter Campbell |Not all interesting things are beautiful and not all beautiful ones are interesting.| “Did she go willingly” by Marina Warner |was [Helen] abducted by Paris or did she go willingly?| |John Lyly gives Helen…
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